1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an apparatus for removing residual rovings on roving bobbins in which rovings are wound onto roving bobbins in a roving frame and unwound therefrom in a ring spinning frame.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In roving techniques, slivers are drawn and twisted to form rovings by means of a roving frame, and the rovings thus formed are wound around roving bobbins by a flyer mechanism and then conveyed and fed to a ring spinning frame. Such a process is generally recognized to be most important in spinning mills.
When a wind-starting end of a roving is attached or fastened to a portion of a cylindrical peripheral wall of a tube of a roving bobbin, it becomes very easy and smooth to start winding the roving by means of a flyer mechanism, and therefore, various efforts have been made to this end. Recently, a measure is employed in which a wind-starting end of a roving is fastened to a special flocked fabric such as a so-called sticking cloth annularly secured to a tube of a roving bobbin, the flocked fabric being made by implanting hairs formed of an elastomeric synthetic resin such as nylon on a ground fabric, and laying down the hairs in one direction so as to form a brush-like surface.
In the above measure, the winding direction of the roving around the bobbin is opposite to the direction in which the hairs emplanted on the surface of the ground fabric are laid down so that fibers forming the roving can be intimately attached to the hairs on the sticking cloth.
In cases where the roving, after having been wound around the roving bobbin according to the above measure, is unwound from the bobbin mounted on a creel in a ring spinning frame, a tendency will unavoidably occur that a lot of fibers still remain on the surface of the sticking cloth even when the roving has been removed from the bobbin. This is because a part of the fibers forming the roving is strongly entangled with the hairs on the sticking cloth. Such fibers remaining on the surface of the sticking cloth (hereinafter referred to as residual fibers) act to substantially reduce adhesion or intimate contact between a wind-starting end of a new roving and the sticking cloth. Thus, in the past, the residual fibers have usually been removed from the sticking cloth by hand, which is very inefficient.
In recent years, in order to facilitate labor saving in spinning mills, bobbin conveyance apparatuses have been widely used which function to continuously return to a roving frame empty roving bobbins, from which rovings have been unwound by means of a ring spinning frame, while the roving bobbins are hung from bobbin hangers in a line.
Due to the necessity for reducing a possibility of rovings being disconnected in a ring spinning frame, a roving is not completely unwound from a bobbin by the ring spinning frame but a small portion of the roving is left thereon so that a new roving cannot be connected with such a roving bobbin. As a result, such a roving bobbin can not be reused in a roving frame and hence development of a novel apparatus has been earnestly desired which is capable of removing residual rovings from roving bobbins in an efficient manner during conveyance of the bobbins from a ring spinning frame to a roving frame by a bobbin conveyance device, but no satisfactory apparatus has yet been reduced into practice.